Re: Changing the charset

On Tue, 19 May 2026 15:45:45 -0700
Jim DeLaHunt via samba <[email protected]> wrote:

> On 2026-05-19 01:23, Stefan G. Weichinger via samba wrote:
> 
> >
> > I recently had an issue where a user couldn't correctly store an
> > email out of his Outlook on an windows 11 PC to samba.
> >
> > Something around illegal characters (sry, I don't have the message
> > at hand right now).
> >
> > The samba is 4.22.8 on Debian-13 and it has been historically
> > upgraded over years ...
> >
> > The former admin configured:
> >
> >     dos charset = CP850
> >     unix charset = iso8859-15
> >
> > And I kept it that way because I didn't want to break things (and
> > it wasn't a problem so far ...).
> >
> > Is changing this to UTF-8 problematic?
> > Does that break filenames or the displayed names? 
> 
> With all due respect to the expert and unendingly helpful Rowland
> Penny, changing a charset from iso8859-15 to utf-8 might very well
> invalidate some stored filenames and configuration strings.
> 
> ISO8859-15[1] is a character set for Western European languages
> written using the Latin script. Every character occupies one byte.
> UTF-8[2] is a way of storing Unicode character values in 1, 2, 3, or 
> 4-byte sequences.
> 
> It is correct that every character in ISO8859-15 can be represented
> in UTF-8. It is also correct that every character in ISO8859-15 which
> has a byte value of 127 or less is represented in UTF-8 by a single
> byte with the same byte value.
> 
> However, those characters in ISO8859-15 which have a byte value of
> 128 or greater are represented by two-byte sequences in UTF-8. So,
> text data — for instance a file name — which was stored as bytes with
> values of 128 or greater, encoded in ISO8859-15, will not be legible
> if read back as UTF-8.
> 
> I do not know how Samba uses those admin settings of "dos charset"
> and "unix charset". I do not know how it affects the interpretation
> of byte values in configuration strings or filenames. Thus I can't
> advise you what else you need to convert when you change these
> settings.  For what it's worth, I have a suspicion that those
> settings may affect how the byte sequences of filenames are
> interpreted, and if your filenames include accented Latin characters
> and such, those filenames will need to be converted from ISO8859-15
> to UTF-8 form separately from Samba. Arnaud Florent's suggestion of
> `convmv` to convert filenames from ISO8859-15 encoding to UTF-8
> encoding seems like it would be helpful.
> 
> > We can't backup/restore all the files or so .. so I have to
> > research how to maybe solve this.
> >
> > Thanks for any advice! 
> 
> Best regards,
>        —Jim DeLaHunt, who knows little about Samba, but a lot about 
> Unicode and UTF-8.
> 
> [1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-15>
> [2] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8>
> 
> 

I bow to your superior knowledge, I am English and we do not have those
funny marks above letters, so I have hardly had this problem, when it
has happened, just removing the lines has worked for myself, I must
just have been lucky ;-)

Rowland


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